Archive for category writing

five things: moving right along

Mar 22

Posted by kate in conventions, five things, WIP, writing | No Comments

Another week over. Why are you speeding by so fast, 2013? Slow down!

Kate at LSFW1. I had a great time at the Liberty States Fiction Writers convention last weekend. (There’s a photo of me at the book fair.) The convention was fun and very well-organized, definitely worth the trip to New Jersey. Plus I got to hang out with some fabulous authors. (Because of the alphabet, I shared a little m/m corner of the book fair with Tere Michaels and K.A. Mitchell, who are both wonderful. And I’m definitely not just saying that!) I got to see and talk to and hang out with some old friends and I met some new people, and I’d list everyone but I’d probably space and forget someone, so suffice it to say it was good.

2. I attended a few really great workshops at LSFW. My favorite was one K.A. Mitchell did on writing characters that connect with your readers. This is something I already knew she did well, which is always a good thing in a workshop. She talked a lot about personality types and Enneagrams, which I didn’t have much familiarity with. (I bought a book on Enneagrams earlier this week to help me develop the characters in my current WIP, although it’s hard not to diagnose my friends. I’ve been following people around and being all like, “Well, clearly you’re an eight.” Um, sorry, friends.)

It’s inspiring to look at something in a different way. That’s an important takeaway from talking with other writers. A lot of people I’ve met in my travels have varied techniques for developing character, plot, and setting, and even though I don’t think all of them will work for me, I appreciate learning new ideas and techniques. The thing with writing, for me anyway, is that there’s always something new I can learn. Let’s hope I can apply some of this to the WIP.

3. So next up is RT. I’m pulling together everything for that now, including last-minute book and swag ordering. I’m a little intimidated by the size of this convention, but I’m excited, too. Although, actually, the Rainbow Book Fair in New York is the next thing on my public-appearance agenda, but that’s one day and doesn’t involve travel so it feels a little less overwhelming, I guess. That’s on April 13th.

4. In non-convention news, I’ve been busy with my day job and revising The Stars that Tremble. Both things are going well, but I’m having one of those weeks that has been so intense and busy that I am quite looking forward to being able to sleep in Saturday.

5. And it’s still winter. Boo. There were snow flurries in New Jersey on Saturday. It snowed here in Brooklyn earlier this week. There were snow flurries today. Um, hullo, universe? It’s spring now. Catch up.

creativity vs. commerce

Feb 19

Posted by kate in WIP, writing | No Comments

I don’t tend to write a lot about craft because I’m fully aware that what works for me as a writer probably won’t work for you. (It very likely won’t, actually; my process is a little weird.) But in an effort to update the blog more than once a week, I wanted to share this revelation I had over the weekend.

I’ve been feeling a little stymied creatively lately. Several things keep happening. I’ve been putting a lot of pressure on myself to just get another book done already. (Now that I think about it, the last novel I finished a first draft of was Out in the Field, which was completed about a year ago. I actually wrote the first drafts of Four Corners and Show and Tell in 2011.) Anyway, I’ve been really struggling with where I should focus my energies, and that has resulted in a somewhat crippling lack of focus; I keep starting new projects without finishing them.

(Novel-length projects, I should clarify. I’ve written a handful of shorts and a novella in the last eight months.)

And then I hated everything I wrote for a while. My writing had lost some of its charm. I wrote a story last September that I liked for its plot, setting, and characters, but I thought the prose was too spare and the sentence structure too choppy. I even had one beta say of something I wrote that it didn’t sound like my voice.

What is happening?

I think a lot of it was the pressure I was putting on myself and the panic of seeing 2013 laid out before me with a whole lot of nothing on the pub schedule, and then I think the writing process became more about Getting It Done than anything else, which kind of took away my enjoyment, which in turn made the writing not so great, and so on.

I had a self-imposed deadline of mid-March, but last week, I made the decision to let that go. Getting It Done was much less important than Writing a Good Novel. So, if it takes me the next six months to finish a book and make it good, so be it. It seems arbitrary, but that decision was freeing in a lot of ways.

Look, I’m all for setting goals. Goals are good. Goals keep us on track, goals help us plan ahead. But I think the lesson here is that churning out a book just for the sake of churning it out is not a good strategy for me. I have to feel passionate about a project in order to write it well, and if I’m more preoccupied with the deadline than the story, well, you can guess how that goes. (And as someone who periodically suffers from pretty intense anxiety, I am always going to be preoccupied with deadlines if they exist. It’s why I don’t think I will be selling stories on spec much anymore.)

Which brings me to my current project. I’m getting back to basics and writing a m/m contemporary set in New York. (I just got tagged to do another Next Best Thing post, so I’ll talk about the story more next week, but the gist is that it’s an opposites-attract romance.) I wrote the first 30,000 words in late December/early January and then promptly got stuck. The key issue was that there just wasn’t enough conflict. The characters met, they had some romance and hot sex, and then any impediment I threw at them seemed stupid and easily resolved. So, I got my writers group involved and handed them the first four chapters. They had a number of really good suggestions, particularly for how to introduce more conflict.

I spent a good chunk of this past holiday weekend working on the story. And, honestly, for the first time in a while, working on it felt more like crafting a story and less like churning out words. One of the characters is an opera singer, so I made a playlist of my favorite arias. (Listening to a lot of opera will make everything seem more dramatic.) I introduced a new character and moved some scenes around. I did some research. I wrote about 6,000 new words. I am so in the heads of these characters that I know them well now. And it all felt really good in the way writing hasn’t in a while.

So here’s hoping I don’t get in my own way again.

I think it’s one of the problems of being a working writer. What we’re told—and what I’ve seen in my own royalty statements—is that putting out books at regular intervals keeps readers interested. But how quickly will my readers drop off if I start putting out crappy books?

Like, the other night, I was having a conversation with someone in which the question was posed: What if you had written 50 Shades? I joked that I could retire. But my friend pointed out that I wouldn’t be okay with having written a book that was so critically reviled (I’d never forgive myself for putting out a book I knew was sub-par) and, more to the point, if I made all that money, I could stop writing, but would I want to? No, absolutely not. Writing is super important to me, it’s how I stay sane sometimes, it’s a creative outlet, it’s the thing I’d like to be doing most days. I wake up thinking about my stories and go to bed thinking about them. I would be incomplete if I gave it up.

But then commerce gets involved. Writing is a creative outlet but it’s also a business. I want to write full time, and therefore I need to sell enough books to sustain that. Then again, I think there’s something to be said for making your next book as spectacular as it can be, and I certainly aim for that whenever I’m working on a new project. Out in the Field did pretty well, I think in large part because of word-of-mouth more than anything I did beyond writing the best book I could.

So it’s a fine line. But for the sake of this project, I’m going to concentrate on writing a good story for a while. I’ll worry about the rest later.

the promised discussion question: research!

Dec 7

Posted by kate in writing | No Comments

I mentioned in my Five Things post that I had a discussion question this week.

Did I mention that I’ve decided to write a Regency? Just, like, to do it? I wrote the first 10,000 words without having done much research at all, so over the weekend I decided to rectify that. I’m the sort of obsessive nerd who will now hoard information on England and the Regency like I’m a squirrel hoarding acorns for the winter, and I’m taking this as my incentive to finally finish reading that book on homosexuality in 19th Century Europe.

Because I am extremely fortunate, I’ve been able to talk to a number of prominent historical romance authors about this, and when you ask the, “How much research do I need to do?” question, you get a pretty wide range of answers. One author told me she checks the origin of nearly every word she uses in the Oxford English Dictionary to make sure her language is correct for the time. A few authors I’ve talked to just like to research because it’s fun or have degrees in related fields. Other authors have said that modern readers mostly just want things that feel historical, so if you’ve read enough historical romances, you probably will get what you need.

That last thing may be true, but for my own writing, I disagree. For example, I recently read a Regency in which something happened or a character said something that I knew (because I’ve been researching) to be demonstrably false. I guess it’s easy enough to read a Regency as taking place in a sort of magical fantasy land, which was how I got through and ultimately enjoyed the book, but when the first stirrings of that plot arc got going, it pulled me right out of the story.

What I personally think is interesting about the Regency era is that this was one of those eras when glitz and glamor and the pomp of the upper classes were actually masking some serious societal problems—horrifying poverty in London, for example. It’s a lot like the Gilded Age or the Jazz Age in America. Or now, even; the peerage in a Regency novel is basically the 1%, right? The seedier elements of society are so often glossed over in traditional Regencies because readers want the fantasy of dancing with a duke at a ball.

I had a really interesting discussion at a reading I went to on Wednesday about why there aren’t more American historical romances given that the largest audience for these books is American. She said she was working on a book that took place in the antebellum American South, and the road block she kept running up against was how to deal with race.

I don’t know why, but this had never really occurred to me before. Probably because it would never occur to me to write a historical novel set in the American South. But this woman I talked to was absolutely right—you can’t ignore or directly address the issues of race in the 19th century without pissing off some contingent of readers.

This got me thinking about how, in some ways, gay romance writers can push the boundaries more. I’ve read gay historicals that explore prostitution and opium addiction and excessive drinking and other less glamorous parts of 19th century life in England. I’ve read at least one m/m romance in which a white man had a relationship with a slave. I’m guessing this is because gay romance is already pushing the boundaries, so why not just keep pushing?

Anyway, I’m just curious. I’m not asking if research is important, but more for y’all to discuss the tension between historical accuracy and the fantasy world of a romance novel. This could be anything from ignoring the economics of an era to having characters who bathe regularly. Discuss!

Miss Mary Sunshine

Apr 4

Posted by kate in books, m/m, writing | 2 Comments

I’m generally an upbeat, positive person. Glass half-full and all that. I get angry and upset and have strong opinions about things, but at the end of the day, I try to see the bright side, the silver lining, try to end the day with a smile. So sometimes I think about commenting on whatever controversies are wending their ways through the Internet, but usually opt not to, both because I’d rather not wade into it and because I’d rather see the happier side of things.

I had the flu last week. I think I got hit with “con crud” from a weekend spent in close quarters with a lot of people plus my body sort of just shut down after a long period of stress and not enough sleep. I didn’t get out of bed for two days, for some taste of the severity of it. I consequently literally slept through all of last week’s Internet kerfuffles, and I think I’m probably better for it. Whenever some fight breaks out in the m/m community, I always feel disheartened and upset, mostly because the Mary Sunshine part of my personality asserts itself and says, “Stop fighting! We’re much better together!”

So, positive things! I got to meet Suzanne Brockmann this past weekend. I’ll just say it: she’s one of my idols. I love the Troubleshooters series; so much of it just works for me: her voice, the tightly-wove suspense, the complex plots, the interesting cast, the willingness to wade into political issues. (Also, my friends can tell you all about my fascination with sailors. Fleet Week is like Christmas for me. You put a hot guy in a crisp white uniform and… hello.) I think Brockmann is actually sort of inadvertently responsible for my getting into this biz at all; I read Hot Target shortly before I discovered m/m proper and was so excited to read about gay characters that I wanted more books with them and started writing my own.

At the time, I don’t think I really appreciated how revolutionary putting a gay pairing in a mainstream romance series was as an act. I was too busy enjoying the books on their own merits—the way that Jules and Robin’s arc is drawn out over several books is delicious, and when they finally get their HEA, you want to scream in triumph, it’s so good. (Not to gush, but…)

Anyway! Brockmann (or “Suz,” she told me I could call her Suz) was at a bookstore on Saturday, so I shored myself up with cold meds and went to see her. I was, needless to say, very excited. Happily, Suz is fun and friendly and enthusiastic in person. And we got to chat some about the Rainbow Romance Writers (of which we are both members) and gay romance and gay rights and so on.

We talked some about gay romance going mainstream. Suz is the author of a couple of m/m shorts that take place in the Troubleshooters universe, plus there’s the whole Robin/Jules arc in the books, and her new series, while primarily a het series, has a gay subplot. (I may have more to say to that later; I’m about 100 pages into Born to Darkness.) But that’s one of the things that Rainbow Romance Writers is doing—we want to take gay romance mainstream. We want it to be commercially available to everyone, we want to reach readers who don’t know m/m romance is a thing, we want to see our books in bookstores alongside all of the other romance on the shelves.

I think it’s an exciting time to be a writer in that way, because I feel like we’re really on the verge of something, of breaking through in a bigger way.

So it’s exciting to me that Suzanne Brockmann has a m/m ebook short coming out this summer. (I just read the story last night, actually, because I got a print copy on Saturday. It’s a Jules/Robin story that may or may not make sense without the context of the series, but it’s a really sweet addition to their story. And When Tony Met Adam came out a year ago, of course. That’s more of a standalone because Tony and Adam are relatively minor characters in the larger Troubleshooters universe.) She pointed out that the book will be published by Random House, which is kind of a Big Deal.

I believe this is important, not just from a sales POV, but because I’ve heard from readers who are excited to see gay lives portrayed positively and with happy endings in fiction, and, you know, love is love. It deserves a place in bookstores just as surely as het romances do.

I saw Suz again on Monday at Lady Jane’s Salon (that NYC’s romance reading series). There was a huge crowd, and, I would say, some enthusiasm for the m/m pairings in Suz’s books. So that’s a great thing to see. (The other readers on Monday were also so much fun that I bought their books as well. Everybody wins!)

So there’s your look-to-the-future, happy optimistic moment for the day!

Also! Be sure to check out this week’s Beat Your Winter Blues, in which I and some other authors talk about our favorite winter movies.

space

Sep 5

Posted by kate in writing | No Comments

I’m a creature of routine, but it’s fun to shuffle things up sometimes. I’m currently in the process of converting the spare room in my apartment into an office. The main goal is to have it be a room in which I want to write. I find that a writing space has to be Just Right for me to be able to do anything effectively.

Coincidentally, Victor J. Banis wrote a post at Jessewave earlier this week about shutting out the outside world to beat writers block. As I commented in the post, I actually do a fair amount of my writing in cafes. The reasons are two-fold: 1) I have a terrible time focusing on only one thing at a time and my mind is often all over the place, so I can concentrate on one task (writing, for example) if there is stuff going on around me that part of my brain can work to tune out; 2) I have found that my apartment is not that conducive to being productive. Until a couple of weeks ago, I didn’t have a designated writing space. I can write while lounging on my couch if I make myself, but I find my mind wanders. Generally, sitting at a desk (or a table in a cafe) in a real chair helps me concentrate on the task at hand. Also, cafes have coffee and pastries.

So, when I started thinking about how to make my “office” an effective space, I thought, well, I could try to re-create a cafe environment, only without all the people. So: coffee and pastries, check! I just bought a French press, and it serves this purpose pretty well. (I like my coffee strong enough to punch me in the face.) Moving the desk so that it faces the window gives me something to look at while I’m sitting at the desk, although, as you can see, I mostly only have a view of the big apartment building across the street.

I’m having a shut-in weekend. I have three days in which I don’t have plans and don’t have to go to the office, so I figured I’d have a few marathon writing sessions in my new office. It’s going pretty well so far. I mean, I’m still easily distracted—I took a break yesterday to read an entire novella; I keep finding music on my computer that I forgot I downloaded; oh, hey, is that Legally Blonde on TV?—but I’m getting a lot done. So it’s a good space.

if nothing else, I am a huge dork

Aug 16

Posted by kate in media, navel gazing, vanity, writing | No Comments

Elisa posted an interview with Ryan Field that I thought was kind of interesting (and a good test of my Italian skills; that is one of my secret talents). Here, I will translate for you (this is the second question):

What kind of readers are you addressing? Those who believe that sex and love are inseparable. And I think that readers are always looking for this union. I also consider that readers are looking for novels with a happy ending that raises them from the stress of real life. Reading a novel, regardless of genre, must help them escape their problems. And from the letters I get, it seems to me that readers are eager to escape reality.

(Italian is not my first language, obviously, so apologies if I goofed anywhere.)

I’ve been thinking a lot the last few days about my own expectations as a reader and why I like romance novels and what I want out of them and so on. I do like realistic, slice-of-life sorts of novels. I like fantasy, too. For example, I just read Jungle Heat by Bonnie Dee. I had some niggles in terms of things I didn’t think were quite realistic, but I really enjoyed the book as a fantasy, insofar as my thinking was, “I’m not sure this could have happened, but wouldn’t it have been cool if it did?” That’s maybe the crux of historical or speculative fiction. I’ve been thinking about that a lot in the stuff I’ve been writing lately, which has definitely been more on the fantastical end of the spectrum. I don’t really know if ghosts exist, but what if they did? How cool would it be if someone had lived through hundreds of years of human history? If someone from 1850 were plunked into 2010, what would they think of all this? Pros, cons, bad, good, what would happen? These are things I think about when contemplating what worlds and ideas I could explore as a writer.

Romance is a different kind of fantasy, though, often “realistic” in that there are characters who live in our world, characters that make mistakes and have mundane jobs and are mostly like us. But romances also take us to world where everyone has a true love and lives happily ever after. Where we get into the heads of characters who lead different lives than we do, characters for whom good things happen. And maybe, as Ryan Field says in the article, part of the fantasy of erotic romance is that sex and love are the same, that one is borne of the other or is an expression of the other or both. Maybe part of the fantasy of romance is that we read these novels and think, “Life could be this way.”

I’ll tell you what my fantasy is: for the sun to break through the thunderstorm currently raging outside my window, and for a good night’s sleep after almost two weeks of travel (I spent the weekend traveling around New England with my family). Actually, if the orange glow on the buildings across the street from my living room window means anything, it’s that my first wish is coming true. Sleep next!

back from vacation; never say never

Aug 11

Posted by kate in in hot pursuit, vanity, WIP, writing | No Comments

I came back from Florida with a burn/tan, and was feeling relaxed enough that it’s been tricky getting back into the groove of my life this week. It’s funny; in some ways, I just fall back into routine because it’s… routine. But it took some self-cajoling to get back to writing after basically taking a week off.

Although, I did some thinking about Noah. I set that novel in Tampa primarily because it was a city in Florida with which I was familiar. I have a friend who lives there, I’ve visited a few times, I knew there was a decent-sized gay community in St. Pete. Last week, I spent time in South Florida and the Keys in an honest-to-God resort just like the one Noah spent most of In Hot Pursuit in with friends (two other women and a gay man). It was sort of interesting to examine that experience in the wake of my recently-published novel, picking apart things I got right in my novel and things I might have done a little differently (mostly, if I had it to do over, I might have included more details about the setting). My vacation involved spending a lot of time on the beach (and getting roasted by the sun while I read romance novels, natch) with the occasional foray into various nearby cities. We even stopped in a gay bar in Key West that reminded me a little of Shanley’s from my novel.

One thing I really love to see in a novel I’m reading is a setting well rendered. I’m in awe of writers who make that setting another character, or who draw it so well that it feels like you’re there. That’s one thing I’m working on, to make my setting more fully realized.

I’m trying some new things now. I think I’m constantly developing as a writer, meaning both that I’m trying to become a better writer in terms of craft and also that I’m willing to take on different genres and topics as I go. When I first started writing seriously, I wrote a lot of thinly-veiled autobiographical stories, but I find that, as I develop as a writer, exploring completely different characters and experiences and worlds is increasingly appealing. I’ve gone from not having any particular desire to wade into the paranormal/fantasy arena to the last couple of months starting to write speculative fiction for the first time ever. And it’s a great amount of fun! Who knew?

I think the lesson is just to be open to everything. I have in the last year or so read and written things I don’t think I would have gotten anywhere near five years ago, but as I develop as a writer, I want to try new things, explore new worlds, do what I can to develop as a writer.

And I have all new respect for spec fic writers who do it well. I mean, on the one hand, you get to make shit up, but on the other hand, you have to make shit up! In some ways, it’s easier to set novels in the real world (especially if you, like me, set the majority of your stories in the city where you live) and you could make the argument that writing fantasy means you don’t have to research, but you DO have to build your world. And that’s a real stretch of one’s creative power.

Anyway, these are just some things I’ve been thinking about. I’m traveling a lot the rest of this month, so I’m a little nervous about squeezing in time to write, but I’m really enjoying the WIPs I have going right now, and that’s kind of half the battle right there.

on the upswing

Jul 13

Posted by kate in writing | No Comments

Watch me bury the lead.

I’m a fast writer. I make up for that by being a slow editor, but when I need to, I can churn out a lot of text. Thus I, in good faith, made a commitment to myself to write 60,000 words this July. This seemed doable; I’m a NaNoWriMo veteran. I wrote 92K words last November. I churned out a 50K-word first draft in 30 days once without really breaking a sweat. (Although that was almost three years ago and I’m STILL revising that one; see, slow editor!) So I thought 60K would be a challenge but one I could rise to, but it’s proving to be a greater challenge than I anticipated. This is in part because I had other things to do July 4th weekend (house guests, baseball games, and cookouts, oh my!). I found that, 10 days into July, I’d hardly written anything.

But I had a random spot of good/bad fortune in that my access to the Internet has been unusually limited over the last couple of days. So I’ve found myself writing. And I’m really excited about my current WIP, which is my first attempt to write something speculative (there are ghosts!). Yesterday evening rolled around and I felt triumphant for having written 5,000 words and finally having found a direction for this novel that I’ve been only just sort of poking at for the last couple of months.

So then I got home and found a new contract in my inbox. That’s right, folks, the ink is drying on the contract for my second novel. I’m really excited about this one. More details on that forthcoming once I know about release dates and things.

So it was a great day for writing! Let’s hope this streak continues.

on rejection and other fun things

Jul 8

Posted by kate in writing | No Comments

Everyone has to deal with rejection. It’s one of those unfortunate facts of life. You interview for jobs you don’t get. You apply for schools you don’t get into. I auditioned for orchestras a number of times when I was in my early twenties, and I can tell you at what point in each failed audition that it started to go south. (For example, When I was maybe 20, I went to an audition in which 40 people were trying to fill 2 slots, so the odds weren’t real high to begin with. But I practiced my ass off and went into that audition and not only nailed the piece I’d prepared, but that piece had been a favorite of the orchestra director. It was a Vivaldi concerto, I think. He was so impressed he handed me the toughest sight-reading sample, some Mendelssohn concerto with a melody written several lines above the staff, and all knowledge of how to play in 7th position or wherever this thing was written flew right out of my head. The orchestra director said, “Come on, you know this one.” Though Mendelssohn has turned out to be the scourge of many an orchestra audition for me—this happened again a couple of years ago, actually—I did not know this particular piece of music, and my brain completely shut down. Thus, rejection.)

This is kind of lame, but I like competition reality shows. At least the contestants have to have a skill. And there are always a couple of contestants who, when they start failing—making mistakes, winding up in the bottom of the rankings—they completely implode. Which I think says something about the nature of rejection. The rejection itself is not necessarily a testament to your skill (or maybe it is, but for the sake of argument, let’s assume some talent) but skill certainly comes into play with how you deal with that rejection. You can let it get to you, let it control how you work from that moment on, let it be an excuse to stop trying. Or you can pick yourself up, try again, and do things better the next time.

Getting rejected for anything is deeply unpleasant, to put it mildly. I’ve gotten a few writing rejections recently, and I find it frustrating, but I think the real key is to remember that one agent/publisher may not like something that another loves, or I wrote something that is good but not right in tone or theme for the person I submitted it to, or what have you. My method is to take a day to mourn the opportunity, then to get back to the writing, to figure out what, if anything, needs to be fixed in the manuscript, to send it back out again. I can only hope my persistence is rewarded.